How to Teach a Child to Wash Hands Properly

Learn how to teach a child to wash his hands properly in this Howcast video featuring potty training specialist Ashley Hickey.

Transcript

Let's talk about how to teach your child to wash their hands properly. First you want to look at all the steps that are involved in hand washing. First, you turn on the water, then you have the child get the soap, they rub their hands together, then they rinse off. In order to teach the hand washing process, you want to help the child with all of the steps except for the last step. So, in order to teach the first step of hand washing, they're actually going to learn the last step. So you are going to turn on the water for them, get the soap for them, rub it into their hands, and then rinse, and then they are going to turn the water off. Once they are able to do that step on their own, then they do the last two steps. So you will do the water on, the soap, the rubbing, and they will do the turning off the water and the rinsing of the hands. As they master each step, they're going to slowly gain another step, so that by the end, they will be doing all of the steps on their own. And that's how you teach hand washing.